Legacy Burden Quotes

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

The inheritance of a distinguished and noble name is a proud inheritance to him who lives worthily of it.

Unfortunately this is the legacy that has been handed to us by the people before us, people who have won the Tour only to disappoint fans a few years later, if this is part of the process we have to go through to get the sport to the better place, obviously I'm here, I'm doing it.

Not everybody knows I'm Bruce Lee's daughter.

I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter].

I was always nervous to play my father's [John Lennon's] songs.

Living down your own past was hard enough. You shouldn't have to live down someone else's.

I would never say that being Bob Marley's son has been a pressure. It has been a door opener.

To equal a predecessor, one must have twice they worth.

No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.

The present is burthened too much with the past.

My uncle Lionel ended up being a bug guy at 20th Century Fox, which my father had been - and, of course, my cousin Randy - you know, one of the great American songwriters. It was a storied family and, in many ways, very tough to emerge from.

This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.

I don't want to be remembered as 'the son of Bruce Lee'.

I understand the repercussions of following in my father's footsteps.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

My father was bigger than life, an entity and everyone expected us, as his offspring, to be saintettes, these little carbon copies.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

I'm like, "Well, damn, that means that I have to carry a flag." I don't have the freedom to just do anything, because I have the political weight of having this last name and my heritage. It's not like I've transcended, Will Smith-style. It takes a lot to pull that off, to cross over, and transcend.

I didn't grow up during the time that Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis and all those people were playing. So it's not really my responsibility to keep it up, what they were doing.

To fill the shoes of rock 'n' roll, because of the family I have, is a really hard thing.

There is nobody that's ever going to fill Ted Kennedy's shoes, and that's a tall order for somebody in the family to try to live up to.

There was no sense of burden, like, 'I now must carry on Robert Kennedy's unfinished work.' Absolutely not.

He thinks posterity is a pack-horse, always ready to be loaded.